Kinder Than Solitude (38 page)

“I didn’t say I hated them,” Sizhuo said.

“Then what’s upsetting you?”

“I don’t know what we are to each other. Perhaps this is never a problem for you, but it’s unnatural.”

“What’s unnatural about being friendly?”

“We’re not meant to be friends.”

“So we should either be lovers,” he said, and watched Sizhuo blush—“or strangers. Are those the only two options? Is there not space in between for us to be genuinely affectionate toward each other?”

Sizhuo looked agonized, cornered by a mind more lucid than hers, though what could his lucidity do but confirm the distance between them? The truth was, wherever they were at this moment—no, before this moment, before she laid out in the open the questions they both must have been asking themselves—whatever they had been then was better. Why, thought Boyang with a weary sadness,
couldn’t people stay in a place they could not name, rather than wanting to know, always wanting to know, more of the truth? Everything comes to an end when explained, rightly or wrongly.

“Can I tell you a story?” Sizhuo asked.

Don’t, his heart cried out. Do not tell your story to me; I’m not one to whom you should entrust your secret. When you hand it to me, you will either expect me to hold it as something precious, or, in exchange, you will expect me to offer you a story of my own. Can’t you see that I’m going to fail you on both accounts? “Certainly,” Boyang said. He had known that sooner or later one of them would have to take a step to make things go one way or another. At least he should be glad that he was not the one who’d lost his poise first. “Do tell.”

“Yet you don’t want to hear it.”

“Of course I do,” Boyang said, turning his eyes away from Sizhuo’s stare. This was going to be the end of something that had not begun properly; would that make everything easier for him, and for her?

“I know you’re lying, but I don’t mind being lied to today,” Sizhuo said. “It’s time to stop this silliness of seeing you every week and pretending all is happy and normal.”

“I haven’t been pretending.”

Sizhuo ignored Boyang’s words, and when she spoke again there was a note of abandonment in her voice. Do not lose your composure over the past, Boyang wanted to advise the girl; what you think of as tragic will one day make you laugh.

The story, as he had guessed, featured a boy and a girl—Sizhuo herself—and would no doubt turn out to be a failed love story of the most heartbreaking kind. He braced himself for the moment when he was expected to offer something—comfort, wisdom, forgiveness.

The two had been playmates, Sizhuo said, having known each other all their lives. The boy, three months older, had taken on the role of big brother—the one to provide and to protect. When their parents could not offer enough food, there had been sparrows killed by a homemade slingshot, cicadas caught with glue attached to the
top of a bamboo pole, frogs, hedgehogs, grasshoppers, all roasted in hot ash. The boy had not been interested in education and had failed school early on; nevertheless, he had been called a smart boy, too smart for his own good in the eyes of his elders. When her parents’ income could not satisfy her need for more books, he had invested his intelligence in stealing: copper wires dug out of the ground, wild ginseng and rare dried mushrooms swiped from the packing factory, small items that people had left around their yards. She had not asked to whom he brought these things—at age ten he was already connected to dubious people out in the world. She had not approved of these misdemeanors, yet neither had she declined the offerings. When she had left her hometown for college in Beijing, he had followed her, discarding a network of friends that could have made his life more convenient in the provincial town. In Beijing he had become an illegal transient, working odd jobs and living a life that did not cross paths with her college life. They met once a month far from campus to take a walk, and always, before parting ways, he would put an envelope of money into her hands and tell her to buy the namebrand clothes that the other girls in the city were wearing.

“What are you thinking?” Sizhuo stopped and asked.

“I was thinking that in everyone’s heart, there’s a graveyard for first love.”

“Of course to you there’s nothing special about the boy’s love.”

“I didn’t say that. He was in love with you, but the question is: were you—or are you—in love with him?”

Sizhuo looked at him strangely. “You can’t be in love with a dead person.”

Boyang felt a pang. How do you, he asked himself, compete with a young man in the grave for a woman’s heart?

The story that followed belonged to the metro section of the evening newspaper, one of those tales in which a young man, having no legal residency in Beijing, brought nothing to the city but chaos and danger. One night he had broken into a rental shared by three young
women. He had thought they were out of town for the Lunar New Year, not realizing that one had returned early. Out of panic, he had stabbed and killed the woman, a journalist whose next assignment was to interview a rising star in local politics.

No doubt the young man’s execution would forever be the pinnacle of a tragedy that Sizhuo thought she could have prevented. Yet he—uneducated, without any connections or means—stood no chance in this city. Apart from some perfunctory sympathy for a life lost, Boyang felt little for the young man. Any premature death could be called a tragedy, but how many tragedies would one be willing to admit into one’s thoughts? There were worse losses: Shaoai, for instance, locked in her own body for twenty-one years. The life she could have made—a brilliant career, a successful family, influences on many lives, good use of her time on earth. Could he explain to Sizhuo that sometimes death was a mercy—that it was worse for the dead to go on living? In an ideal world, death should be the end of the story, but in this world, where they had to make do with muddles, death never ended anything neatly. “Your friend made a mistake,” Boyang said. “And yes, a pricey one. But if I were you, I wouldn’t burden myself with unnecessary guilt.”

“But you are not me.”

“You wouldn’t have changed many things in his life.”

“At least I could have let him believe he had a chance.”

“At what? Your love, or a better life in this city?”

“Either,” Sizhuo said hesitantly. “Or both.”

“But you were not in love with him, and you know that. You couldn’t have gotten him a better job, and you know that, too. What’s the point of regretting something you haven’t done wrong? The same misfortune could have befallen him all the same, and you would be sitting here feeling guilty for having lied to him about your love.”

Sizhuo looked a little dazed. “But in his mind, he must have thought part of his misfortune my responsibility.”

“Did he say that to you?”

“He always asked me why I hadn’t been like the other girls and found a sugar daddy in this city.”

Boyang cringed. That she had no trouble saying the words
sugar daddy
made him sad.

“He considered all men who were richer and older his enemies. He considered the young men whose parents had already bought them apartments in Beijing, and who already had the best jobs lined up for them, his enemies. But you must admit that he was not wrong. What did he have but his wish to make a better case for his love?”

Boyang felt an icy tingling on his back. Somewhere, the ghost of the young man must be glaring at him, resenting him, because he possessed what the young man would never be able to have.

“He always said he knew what I was going to do,” said Sizhuo. “He said that I would sell out in exchange for a comfortable life.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Does that mean that I haven’t thought about it, or I won’t ever? What am I doing here with you if I am not considering that possibility? If I were a better person, I would have said no to you right away because everything in connection with you proves him right.”

“Why not look at it this way? You didn’t say no because I didn’t come simply to propose that I become your sugar daddy.”

“But what do you call what we’ve been doing?”

“We’re trying to get to know each other.”

“Is that what we’re doing? Do we know each other better than we did four weeks ago?” Sizhuo said. “Or are we just avoiding getting to know each other, because it’s too much of a risk for you?”

Again Boyang was frightened by the abandonment in her tone. “But not a risk for you?” he asked.

“What do I have to lose?” Sizhuo said.

Her childlike defiance unnerved him. He had never asked himself if she was worth his effort because to ask was to admit that this was more than a game. He had believed that at any moment he could
leave, but what he hadn’t realized was that she had, without his knowing it, taken his deposit—of what?—his honor, his peace, or even his hope of building something called a life with her. How could he explain to her that she had too much to lose, not only on her own behalf, but on his, too? “What,” he said with some difficulty, “can I do to make things better?”

“It’s not what you can
do
, don’t you see?” Sizhuo said. “It’s what kind of person you are, but I don’t know who you are, or what you are. Sometimes I think maybe I did make the mistake of never committing to any position—had I chosen to be practical, had I chosen to be like some of my classmates from freshman year, my friend might have lost hope in this city and might not have stayed. So why didn’t I? Did I think I deserved great love, when other girls like me had resigned themselves to reality? But if I didn’t want to sell out, I should’ve been stronger. I should’ve believed in building a future with him in this place, however hard it would have been; I should’ve received his presents and returned with …”

Abruptly Sizhuo broke off. The waitress was coming with a steaming pot but had stopped a couple of steps away, lest it was not the right time. Sizhuo looked away with a flushed face, and Boyang motioned for the waitress to bring the stew over. She ladled the soup into two bowls and told them to enjoy. The moment before she turned away, Boyang caught a slight mocking smile on the face of the middle-aged woman.

“Well, eat something hot,” Boyang said.

Sizhuo made no movement to touch the food. “I was thinking before you picked me up today that we should stop this nonsense.”

“Why do you call it nonsense, when it seems to me to be the most sensible thing for two people to get to know each other?”

“It won’t work out in the end.”

“You don’t know that if we haven’t tried.”

Sizhuo looked at him sadly. “You know what’s the only thing that
could absolve me? To fall in love with you, to have you fall in love with me—no, not you, but any man who is in a better position than my friend. Only love can absolve me, can’t you see? If only I could prove to my friend that a man richer and older than he can love as he did—do you see?”

Could he, or anyone, love as the dead boy had?

“You look hesitant. And you’re right to hesitate. You don’t feel up to the challenge, or perhaps it’s not even fair to ask you to try, because you would always suspect that I would compare you to him, or else I would use you. Sometimes I thought it would be better if I found another boy like him, who had nothing to his name, and we would support each other in our struggling. No, you’re laughing, and you’re right that however honorable that sounds, we would not get very far. Yes, I know that, but it isn’t for that reason that I’m not dating another boy like him,” Sizhuo said, looking into Boyang’s eyes, the tears she had been holding back now rolling down without inhibition. “But this: if I could make a life with someone
like
him, why not with him in the first place?”

Sizhuo stood abruptly and said she would be right back. For a moment Boyang worried that she would leave without him—he could see her do that, sneaking out of the restaurant and walking to the nearest bus stop, asking a passerby the bus schedule, playing hide-and-seek when he went to hunt for her. But to allow himself to panic was to surrender to a situation where he should have control. To distract himself, he took out his phone to see if anyone had contacted him in the past few hours.

An email from Ruyu was waiting for him, in his regular account, and only later did he figure out that it must not have been difficult for her to find that address. He had registered with that email on a few social media websites, and he had a microblog connected to the email.

The message was short: Ruyu gave the address of a hotel and the telephone number, and said that she would like to meet. There was
no mention of how long she would stay, or when would be a good time for her.

Boyang felt sweat on his palms. The most sensible thing would be to call now rather than later, though Sizhuo would be back any minute. He looked around and signaled for the waitress to bring the check. “To-go containers?” she asked, looking at the untouched food.

“No, just bring me the bill.”

The waitress gave him an I-knew-it look. As she walked to the counter, she looked at Sizhuo, who had come out of the ladies’ room with slightly swollen eyes, without hiding her interest. With so many people coming and going through her restaurant, Boyang thought, the waitress must need to find a way to score points over the customers, morally or in another manner, but don’t we all do that? “I hope you don’t mind that I asked for the check,” he said when Sizhuo sat down.

She shook her head and said she was ready to leave.

He drove faster than usual on the way back, honking at the slower cars and cursing under his breath at the trucks. He was aware that Sizhuo watched him critically, and he wondered whether this behavior would be misunderstood—though did it really matter now if he was misunderstood by her? As they approached the city, traffic slowed to a worm’s speed, and he could not help but press his upper body against the steering wheel from time to time and join the chorus of honking. The fourth time he did this, Sizhuo looked at him coolly and said, “Do you think that’s going to change anything?”

“I’m not doing it to change anything.”

“Complaining?”